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Who's Who - Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919)
saw herself as a citizen of the proletariat.

She lived the
international life of a Socialist 'pilgrim', believing that only socialism
could bring true freedom and social justice.

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Luxemburg was an advocate
of mass action, spontaneity, and workers democracy but her criticism of the
revisionist position of Edward Bernstein is considered her most important
legacy to European political thought:

"Bourgeois class
domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising
of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity,
but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat."

(from 'The Junius
Pamphlet', 1916)

Rosa Luxemburg was born in
Zamosc, in Russian Poland, into a Jewish middle-class family. At the
age of five she became seriously ill. After recovering she walked with
a limp and later sciatic pain caused her much trouble.

She was educated at the
Warsaw Gimnazium and from the age of 16 participated in revolutionary
activities. Her favourite writer during these years was the Polish
poet Adam Mickiewicz, whose patriotism and life in political exile
influenced her deeply.

In 1889 she moved to
Switzerland to continued her studies. In part she was forced to flee
from Poland on account of her political activities. Luxemburg entered
the University of Zurich, where she studied natural sciences and political
economy.

She began her career as a
journalist and became one of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party of
the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. In 1898 Luxemburg completed her
doctorate; her dissertation was entitled 'The Industrial Development of
Poland'.

1899 sae the appearance of
Luxemburg's 'Reform or Revolution', her defence of Marxism. It opposed
Edward Bernstein's reformist position and criticized Bernstein's revisionist
theories in his 'Evolutionary Socialism' (1898).

A German citizen by
marriage Luxemburg became in 1898 a left wing leader of the German Social
Democratic Party (SDP) and participated in the
Second International and
during the 1905 revolution in Russian Poland.

The following year, 1906,
she was arrested in Warsaw but ultimately finally on health grounds.
She returned to Germany where she taught at the SDP school in Berlin until
1914, developing ideas about general strike as a political weapon.

1912 brought the
publication of her major theoretical work, 'The Accumulation of Capital', in
which she attempted to prove that capitalism was doomed and would inevitably
collapse on economic grounds.

Following differences with
moderate German socialists Luxemburg founded, with
Karl Liebknecht, the
radical Spartacus League in 1916. Two years later the organization
became the German Communist Party.

Luxemburg spent much of
World War I in prison, meanwhile writing her 'Spartakusbriefe' and 'Die
Russisce Revolution', where she welcomed the October Revolution as a
precursor of world revolution. In the wake of the Spartacist uprising
in Berlin against the government, in which she proved a reluctant
participant, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested in 1919.

While being transported to
prison she and Liebknecht were murdered on the night of 15/16 on January
1919 by German Freikorps soldiers. Luxemburg's body was thrown into
the Landwehr canal and found several months later in May. She was
buried on June 13 in Friedrichsfeld cemetery where Liebknecht and other
revolutionaries were similalrly buried.

Luxemburg's lover Leo
Jogiches was also murdered in 1919. Just before his death he had
decided with Clara Zetkin and Mathild Jacob to publish Luxemburg's collected
works. The project proceeded slowly on account of objections lodged by
Lenin to Luxemburg's work. Lenin argued that Luxemburg had
underestimated nationalist ideology, underrated the role of the Communist
party, and overly emphasised the power of mass action.

Luxemburg in turn was
critical about Lenin's acceptance of the idea of national
self-determination. Luxemburg's collected works were eventually
published in East Germany between 1970-75.

"The list of people with
whom Simone Weil was politically associated reads like an almanac of the
French Left. Thévenon, Guérin, Battaille, Serret. Simone saw
in Rosa Luxemburg (d. 1919) a kindred soul. 'Her life, her work, her
letters affirm life and not death,' wrote Simone. 'Rosa aspired to
action, not to sacrifice. In this sense, there is nothing Christian
in her temperament.'"

(from 'The Left Hand of
God' by Adolf Holl, 1997).

Thorough re-evaluation of
Luxemburg's work began in her German homeland in the 1970s. Her
theories were increasingly considered an alternative to Communism or Social
Democracy. When Marxist study began to lose its allure in the 1980s,
Luxemburg arose still further interest among feminist theorists.

Luxemburg herself did not
involve herself with the women's rights movement: female liberation was for
her part and parcel of the liberation from the oppression of capitalism.